


The Player; or, Traynor in Flust

by ApocalypseThen



Series: The Samantha Traynor Adventures [1]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Awkward Flirting, Board Games, Everybody Lived AU, F/F, Kepesh-Yakshi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:06:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26614933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApocalypseThen/pseuds/ApocalypseThen
Summary: In which Samantha Traynor flirts her way into the finals of the regional invitational Kepesh-Yakshi tournament.
Relationships: EDI/Samantha Traynor, Female Shepard/Samantha Traynor
Series: The Samantha Traynor Adventures [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2007118
Kudos: 9





	The Player; or, Traynor in Flust

Samantha awoke to the sound of silence. The everyday hum of ventilation, the intermittent throb of coolant, the muffled clatter of breakfast being prepared with more enthusiasm than competence... all were absent. She remembered with a pang that Shepard was away, so that explained that last one. But she hadn't taken birdsong and rustling leaves with her, Sam was pretty sure. Her suitcase hadn't been _that_ big.

There was nothing. Samantha lay there, wondering if she was actually awake. It occurred to her that if she was, then the lack of stimulation to her auditory nerve would lead inevitably to her brain 'just making shit up' as one of her less refined lab partners had put it. She should be hearing things, but there was nothing. 

Perhaps a white noise generator? That would keep her ears tickled enough that tinnitus didn't kick in. Maybe the fish tank was on the fritz again, whooshing away continuously. That wouldn't explain the lack of other noises, though.

She could just open her eyes, she supposed, and find out where the silence was coming from. But then she'd have to get up, and get dressed, and do things like an adult who had a job. Why couldn't she just stay in bed until Shepard got back? She snuggled back against the pillow.

Something was definitely off. Even ultra-high-threadcount hypoallergenic bedding should rustle just a little bit. She could feel it under her. She just couldn't hear it. She sighed... and felt the breath go in and out but didn't hear a thing, not even through her bones. This was turning into a regular puzzle. Who stole Samantha's ears?

She sighed again. That's what you got for standing too close to an exploding frigate. The doctors had fixed her, and her fancy bio-synthetic implants were if anything a shade better than her original hearing, when their damn software didn't decide to do a hard reboot during the night. She knew it was the most likely explanation. She just preferred a good mystery. 

Samantha supposed she'd have to get up and call the clinic. They'd link her to the diagnostic modules at Vancouver Central. She wasn't that keen about having implants, but they were nothing compared to the metal Shepard was running on. At least if hers shut down, she didn't fall down dead.

Samantha opened her eyes. Everything was as it should be, apart from the gaping Shepard-shaped void in her heart. She'd keep herself busy until Shepard got back from her trip, and she'd smile and it would all be fine. The sex would be more terrific than usual, and the uncontrollable crying wouldn't last nearly as long, she was quite determined about that.

She rolled out of bed and fumbled for her dressing gown. The call to the clinic couldn't wait. If she couldn't hear, then how would she know when the kettle was almost, but not quite, boiling? Her tea would certainly be ruined, and then she'd feel out of sorts for the rest of the day.

Shouting sleepily at a terminal without being able to hear was an odd experience. Luckily there was a speech-to-text interface. She brought her implants in range of the wireless node and they connected to the diagnostic hub over the secure line. It took a few minutes longer to run than she remembered. The nurse gave her a countdown before sliding the volume up slowly.

"...better now? Now?" the nurse was saying.

"Perfect!" replied Samantha. "Thank you!"

After some more back and forth, the nurse let her go. Samantha knew she could have handled all the software herself (roll your own finite impulse response filters, anyone?) but the doctors insisted and Shepard never quite agreed with her when she brought it up. Pfft. She supposed she had to get used to not being at war any more, and doing things the right way.

Speaking of which, today she was going to gate-crash the regional invitational Kepesh-Yakshi tournament. A smile bloomed across her face as she imagined bathing in the adulation of the local yokels who fancied themselves players. They'd be stumbling over themselves to give up their spots to her.

The kettle reached the not-quite boiling point and she made tea.

"Sam-Sam-Samantha." The voice spoke with a sultry echo.

Samantha spun around, sloshing scalding hot tea all over the floor. Luckily, since she used a Reverse English grip on the teacup, her dressing gown was barely splashed. "EDI?" she squeaked. She looked. There were many kitchen cabinets, and no synthetic bipeds.

"Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha," tinkled EDI. Her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, the laughs overlapping. "Over-over-over-here-here-here.”

Samantha narrowed her eyes. "You've hacked my ears, you metal minx!" She'd been saving that one up for a while. 

"Sam-Sam-Samantha. Cal-cal-cal-ibrating. Please-please-close-please-close-your-close-your-eyes-eyes-eyes.”

"I'll do no such thing!" Samantha squawked indignantly. "Un-hand, I mean un-ear me, I mean, you know what I mean! Immediately!"

"Hel-hel-help," echoed EDI's voice. "Gun-gun-gunpowder-trea-powder-treason-and-powder-and-plot.”

"What are you on about?" said Samantha. "Oh, if I find out this is another of your _jokes_ , I swear..." She left her thought unfinished as she screwed her eyes shut.

"Than-thank-you-you-you-you," said EDI, her voice rattling from every direction. "Say-say-say-sassa-sassa-sassafras-to-to to my sister Sarah. Thank you. Calibration achieved. Please choose a location for virtual voice projection."

"Arcturus!" Samantha all but stamped her foot.

"Default location selected." EDI's voice now sounded as if it was resonating right inside Samantha's head. Despite, or perhaps because of her annoyance, she felt her belly grow warm.

"Oh, be like that! Left ear comm-bead simulation," Samantha snapped.

"Parameters set." EDI sounded a lot less like she was in the room and more like a radio transmission. Samantha could deal with that a whole lot better than having an invisible succubus rattling around in her head. She opened her eyes again.

"Now what's this all about?" Samantha demanded. She looked at the tea on the floor, trying to decide whether to make another cup or clean up first.

"Samantha. A situation has arisen. Your unique skill set is required. You must go to these coordinates." EDI recited a string of numbers. "Once there you will receive further instructions."

Samantha skirted the puddle and cast around for her omnitool. She muttered the numbers under her breath while she looked. "Hold on... Granville Island? I was going there anyway! Is this about the tournament?"

"That information will be released at the appropriate time," said EDI. "You have forty minutes. You must prepare."

Samantha fumed silently while she considered her options. "Confirm your identity," she demanded finally.

EDI whispered in her ear at some length. Samantha felt the blush spread up from her navel to her crown. "OK! OK, stop! It's you." EDI fell silent. "Promise me you've never told anyone else about that."

"I have not," said EDI, "and the recording will not be released if certain criteria continue to be met. You have my word."

Samantha felt her heart race again. "Is that a threat? Is this blackmail?"

"I have always understood blackmail to require an unwilling participant," EDI replied. The purr in her voice must have been in Samantha's imagination. AIs didn't talk dirty like that.

Samantha took a moment to tally her physical symptoms. Knee: quivering. Heart: pounding. Sweat glands: overactive. Vision: sharp as a pin. She looked around the kitchen and saw the dirt in the corners, the unwashed dishes that she'd been ignoring. She still didn't care, but it no longer bothered her that she didn't. Her mind was already racing ahead, compressing the logistics of bathing and transportation into the window EDI had mentioned.

On the Normandy she could be up, showered and dressed in six-and-a-half minutes if there wasn't a rush. Her bloody hands didn't _shake_ all the bloody time, back then, of course, when overexposure had rendered her more or less immune to adrenaline. "Crisis? What crisis?" she mumbled to herself as she scrubbed. "Oh, just another day at the office, dear, robot assassins and rogue AIs."

Samantha pictured Shepard's crooked grin and tried to make her face do the same thing. One day she'd get it right. "Hmm... well, then." Time was wasting. "Bugger that." She tossed aside the sensible clothes she'd laid out the night before. She went to the end of the cupboard where boots were shot on sight. "It's time."

While she'd systematically purged black from her wardrobe in a fit of overcompensation during Shepard's last absence but one, Samantha had kept one outfit, never worn, against the day. It had cost more than the rest of her clothes, combined.

It was mostly silk. It was very black. As it warmed up to her skin, it felt like nothing at all, better than any armour ever could. There was even a concealed pocket for her inhaler.

Samantha preened for a moment in front of the mirror. "Ah-hum," EDI interjected. "Twenty-two minutes."

"Roger that," Samantha said. Her brain felt ice-cool, fog-free. _Maybe I've just been dressing too warm for the season?_ She pushed the thought away and jostled her omnitool.

Skycars for miles around turned around, diverted, made unscheduled recharging stops or suffered non-critical failures to their navigational systems, all except for one, which received emergency clearance to break the noise regulations in a semi-urban area. It landed just outside the picket fence.

Samantha flung the matching black bolero jacket over her shoulder, snagged her sunglasses and swaggered out of the door.

A confused asari stared at her as she picked her way up the garden path. "Excuse me...? Is this the... university?" 

"There'll be another one along in a minute," Samantha reassured her as she slid past her to claim the front seat. The doors slammed shut and the car took off at priority speed, kicking up a rooster-tail of dust that had the asari stepping smartly out of the way. "Oh dear," she mumbled to herself, looking back. Then she settled back into the seat to enjoy the traffic-free skies.

Samantha let a wry smile crease the corners of her eyes. She knew that asking EDI what was going on was a losing gambit. Question-and-answer with EDI always, unaccountably, most curiously, in ways that no objective witness could ever accuse _Samantha_ of enabling, inevitably led to crown-to-toe blushing sessions.

The smell hit her as soon as the glass doors slid aside, a potent cocktail of soap and nervous sweat that was as familiar as her old college scarf. She took a moment to let the swarm of memories zip by, and grabbed on to some of the good ones.

Her student days had been punctuated by weekends like this, crowded into under-heated competition halls with a hundred-odd other like-minded sentients to pit their wits against each other. More than anywhere, this had been her home, more than anyone, these had been her people. Things had changed, but she didn't feel the slightest disdain for them; how could she? They had made her who she was.

Looking around the atrium now, she noticed that it had been a two-way street. There were several people wearing their fedoras tilted low over their eyes, not a few back-buckled satchels. She blushed to remember quite how fashionably unfashionable she had been, and even deeper when she realised how long she'd been away. She felt conspicuously overdressed as she waded into the buzz.

"...six times quickly. Try it!" "Reluctantly: Very well. Kepesh. Yakshi. Kepesh. Yakshi. Kepshi. Yak... With Great Amusement: Ha. Ha. Ha. You were right."

"... then I _triple_ -bluffed, and..." "So, like a single-bluff, then?" " _Triple_ , I said, and then I..." "What, did you do, waggle your eyebrows at him? Blurt out 'Of course, I'm bluffing, wink wink'?" "I don't _have_ eyebrows..."

"Did you hear? Reverse-Ilium's been put on the list!" "What? They might as well just ban T'Susza from ever playing again!" "Burn!"

EDI finally broke radio silence. "Time is short, Samantha. You must gain access to the auditorium. The spectator's gallery..."

"Spec _tate_!" Samantha's indignant squawk silenced the room for a hot second. "Um, excuse me," she said, avoiding eye contact with the room by bringing her hand up to her face. "Cough, cough, sorry."

"You must neutralise the target before the beginning of the..." EDI began.

Samantha balled her fists and hissed through her teeth. "EDI, I do not _watch_ Kepesh-Yakshi. I _play_ Kepesh-Yakshi. For a few months in '85, I _was_ Kepesh-Yakshi."

"You were the Hat-Bearer for less than six weeks," EDI corrected her. "According to the records, you lost your title after the results were retroactively corrected following an appeal related to the medicati..."

"A _technicality_." Samantha ground her teeth, but had to swallow the rest of her retort. She'd been recognised. "Traynor? _Samantha_ Traynor?" The fringe nearly hid the girl's face completely, although her nose was lovely and pert. "Oh, oh, oh, I'm such a fan, oh wow, I've seen vids of all your games, Zolb in '83, how did you, I mean, how did you _know_? I mean _how_? And..."

Samantha couldn't stop herself from smiling. This wasn't what she played for; but she didn't mind it either. She took the girl by the arm and spun her gently around. "Zolb? _That_ was a game." She let her voice carry. "Sixteen moves in, and I was down two fighters, my destroyer was pinned in quadrant two. But Zolb, there, what you have to know about Zolb is that they're a very very good player, when they're not being a complete nincompoop."

The girl laughed. Samantha walked with her, arm-in-arm, in the general direction of the registration booth. "Samantha," EDI transmitted, "I do not comprehend your strat..."

"Ahem!" Samantha said, causing more heads to turn. "So, _Zolb_. Zolb, back then, you could absolutely trust to take the bait, _any_ bait, as long as you dangled it in quadrant four before move twenty-three..."

By the time they reached the booth the crowd surrounding them was three deep. "...and then I said, 'well, it takes one to know one', and I played hq3-f6!"

Samantha waited for the laughter to die down, then she addressed the registrar. "Samantha Traynor, substituting for..."

Five omnitools thrust eagerly into the air, holographic invitations waving. The girl on her arm held one of them. "Not you dear, I'd quite like to see you play," Samantha whispered. The girl blushed, hard, and Samantha felt her own skin heat up in sympathy.

Well if _flirting_ was wrong she didn't want to be right.

Samantha flourished her jacket to acknowledge the crowd. As they stepped back, she turned to descend the stairs to the player's area before she could get caught up in another anecdote. "So, EDI," she whispered between clenched teeth, "give me the rundown?"

"I am recalibrating mission parameters," EDI replied. "Since you will no longer have line-of-sight to the target unless you are actually _playing_ against them."

"You weren't expecting me to assassinate someone, were you?" asked Samantha. "Because I left my sniper rifle at home!"

"I was not aware that you were proficient," replied EDI. "However, procuring such an armament will take too long."

"You do!" Samantha squeaked. With her teeth clenched it made her cheeks puff out. "You want me to kill someone! I was just joking!"

"So was I."

Samantha tried to breathe deeply through her nose. Talking to EDI always made her want to scream.

"Recalibration complete," EDI announced.

Samantha missed screaming, sometimes. "And?" she hissed.

"You will have to win."

"I can do _that_." Samantha was on firmer ground with that kind of goal.

Her opponent for the first round was a thin man who clearly had no idea who she was and who tried an exotic but horribly flawed opening. She thanked him perfunctorily once the neural shock had worn off. His head twitched in acknowledgement although he couldn't make eye contact. It had taken her just eleven moves.

Unbelievably, at least to Samantha, there were some people who liked to play Kepesh-Yakshi without the neural feedback. What on earth could the point be of playing _Space Battleships_ \--- Shepard had called it that once, and there had nearly been a _ruckus_ , but then, the freckles, and the arms... anyway --- what was the point of playing without stakes that involved the public humiliation of writhing around on the floor, nerveless and overloaded? Hardly anyone ever weed themselves from it, but for her, nothing came quite as close to the manageable, wholesome, _terror_ that came with the threat of defeat. She'd felt the real thing, so she knew what she was talking about.

The second round proved only a little more challenging. The salarian was a quick thinker, but lacked patience. She could practically read the moves he was planning to make off his ever-moving lips. Still, it was a decent enough showing, and he took his inevitable defeat with as much grace as anyone having all their pain receptors prodded at the same time could.

The other reason that Samantha loved strategy games was that they forced you to get inside your opponent's head. There was a peculiar satisfaction to being able to predict someone's intention, to having a model of them in your head so precise that you could entice them to stumble and fall. 

She sighed. Of course, it was never as simple as all that. For all the smug satisfaction she felt in victory, it came with a certain envy of the defeated. The idea that someone could know her so completely was thoroughly romantic. She knew it was a weakness that she had better never let be discovered and exploited, lest she end up like drooling like jelly gone bad on the floor of the auditorium. She had no doubt that there were others who had similar ideas, but there were as many motivations and playing styles as there were people in the galaxy. Which made pining to be crushed by the perfect opponent even more quixotically romantic, frankly.

Samantha grinned. She was finding her way back into her old headspace, where she'd lived for so long while she was at college, and a regular at these events.

"With Sincere Regret: Eat Laser Death, Puny Human." 

Talking trash with her elcor opponent in the third round was more fun than Samantha had had in weeks. She had to be careful not to let her enthusiasm distract her from the elegant tactics that the elcor employed, but he too succumbed. "Smell you later," she winked.

"Exhortation: You Have. Not Heard. The Last. Of This," he chattered as he vibrated on the spot.

If there was one thing that she could criticize Shepard for, it was that she had to use an awful lot of words to communicate concepts Samantha found intuitively obvious. She had to remind herself that Shepard sometimes spoke more in five minutes of cuddling than in a whole week at the academy; apparently in the military 'grunt' wasn't just a designation, it was also a language. So she was willing to forgive her that.

On the other hand, this fourth-round fellow could go jump in a lake, maybe that would be enough to drown out his interminable drone. Kepesh-Yakshi attracted its share of nerds but she could only assume that this one was doing it deliberately to distract her from his actually rather cunning moves. She took pleasure in dispatching him as coldly and dispassionately as possible. She didn't even arch her eyebrows at him when she won.

"Well played, Samantha," said EDI's voice in her head. Samantha blushed and looked around stupidly to see if anyone else had heard. She'd forgotten that EDI was... spectating, somehow? She facepalmed mentally. In all likelihood EDI was just following the public feeds like the... who was she kidding, tens, possibly even _dozens_ of hardcore fans who couldn't afford the free tickets.

There was a break before the quarter-finals. Samantha headed to the toilets. She always got jumpy when the game got serious. She splashed some water on her face and looked at herself in the mirror. She liked her outfit even more, now that it had seen some action. The sleeves had rumpled most attractively. "Who's a handsome devil?" she asked the mirror coyly.

"You are," EDI replied, taking a beat too long to continue, at least as far as Samantha was concerned, since she was pretty sure normal humans finished their sentences quicker, she'd had time for two heartbeats already, or just under a second at current rates, and AIs thought a _lot_ faster than that, "talking to yourself." 

"Am I not crushing it?" Samantha replied. She arched her eyebrows. "Hmm?"

"I believe the expression is: 'Don't Get Cocky'," EDI replied.

"Oh, I'll get cocky," Samantha admonished the mirror. "I might even become brash. What do you think about that, eh?" She leaned forward on her hands, hanging her weight off the sink and inspecting the mirror closely. Having EDI in her head had loosened her tongue. And now she was thinking about loose tongues. She hoped EDI couldn't see her. Likely as not just hearing the pitch and cadence of her speech would be enough for EDI to reconstruct what was rattling around in her head. Or perhaps that was just wishful thinking.

"You should urinate while you have the chance," EDI said.

Samantha felt her skin prickle, and suddenly she felt self-conscious, like she was being observed. She was sure she hadn't heard the door open.

"Uh... hey," said the girl with the fringe. "Miss Traynor?"

Samantha was caught between the rigor of embarrassment and the desire to scoop the girl up and squeeze her until all the pertness fell out. "Just Samantha," she said.

"It's playtime, Samantha," said the girl. A full second later, she blushed.

Samantha's eyebrows were getting a good workout today. She spread her smile as wide as it would go, and took the girl's arm for the second time. "And who will I be playing next?" she asked, unable and unwilling to keep the flirt out of her voice.

"Oh!" said the girl. "Uh. Me?"

There followed the most perfect moment of completely unambiguous non-verbal communication that Samantha had ever experienced. They moved apart slightly so that it didn't burn where they touched.

Samantha felt a pang of regret. Unless the girl was playing her --- like that one time T'Susza had come over all flirty... her skin still crawled at the thought --- she was fairly confident she knew everything she needed to know about her to predict at least the first five moves of the game.

And indeed, thirty-five moves later, Samantha made bedroom eyes across the table as her opponent's widened in flust, the potent distillate of fear and lust. Then Samantha sank her last frigate and the girl went to the floor to curl in something that only Samantha's expert eye would know from agony. She stayed there for somewhat longer than seemed strictly necessary.

Well, at least _somebody_ was having their submissive fantasies of being lovingly crushed in public by a smoking-hot opponent fulfilled.

"It would appear that you are victorious again," transmitted EDI.

"Mmm-hmm," Samantha agreed. She was between tables, but the hundred or so players who had been knocked out had swelled the ranks of the spectators considerably. She had a reputation to uphold. She flashed a winning smile to nobody in particular.

The semi-final match was over almost before it started. He was barely better than a random number generator, a disciple of the tedious school of victory through statistics. Like a tossed coin, some of them imagined that if they flipped heads a hundred times in a row they would be guaranteed a win. It was rare to find them in such an advanced round. The better class of players had effective strategies to force a win; the only difficulty sometimes was identifying them as a randomizer before their ships popped up in your home quadrant. This one, on the other hand, was proudly wearing a symbolic die on the chestplate of his... robot costume? Did he worship synthetics for their superior pools of entropy?

Samantha shook her head as the crowd muttered their approval. She stepped around the twitching corpse of her latest kill, mentally wiping down her blade, ready for the final opponent. She hoped they would be worthy. So far... well, it had had its moments, but no real challenge, not by her standards. She moved towards the table in the middle of the auditorium and lingered at the threshold marked by the dramatic lighting, waiting for her opponent to manifest. The crowd buzzed politely.

"Samantha," said EDI. Samantha twitched. That's right, she was here on a secret assassination mission. She'd forgotten again. "You must defeat your final opponent. It is critical that they not be allowed to leave victorious. The fate of a small group of slightly important people will be in part determined by your actions here. Utilize any means at your disposal. Good hunting."

 _Ominous much?_ Samantha thought. She wanted to know more about the mildly critical nature of her somewhat secret mission, but she couldn't talk back, there were too many eyes on her. Then there was movement in the shadows across from her.

Her heart sank. A tall asari with thin lips strode confidently across to the game table. Pff. Samantha shook off the unsportsmanlike feelings and went to join her. "T'Susza," she said as neutrally as she could. "Good to see you."

Polgara T'Susza, Samantha's nemesis on the circuit for so long, her relentless rival for the number one spot on the Oxford team, and possibly the worst one-night stand experience that anyone had ever had in the history of bad ideas, deigned to peer down her nose. "Traynor. I heard you had put in an appearance."

"Sorry to spoil your fun, Polgara," Samantha replied.

"Oh, not at all," T'Susza smiled. Samantha felt her brain freeze. Something wasn't right. T'Susza was being... _nice?_

And besides, what possible galaxy-defining reason could EDI have for needing T'Susza crushed? It didn't make sense. Samantha soldiered on regardless. "Shall we?" she asked.

"Shall we what?" T'Susza replied. She made a show of studying the confusion on Samantha's face. "Traynor. I am the adjudicator today. _That_ is your opponent." She pointed. The smirk was in her voice, if not on her face. "Good luck."

Bluffing was important in Kepesh-Yakshi. Some players tried to make you think that they were weaker than they really were, some projected cool rationality while allowing a controlled element of chance into their game. It wasn't like chess, where everything was out there on the board for all to see, naked. Chess was about pure calculating power, intellectual dominance. Kepesh-Yakshi was a strip-tease of a game, layer upon layer of tactics peeling away to reveal nested strategies that uncovered the fatal flaw in every player's personality.

Samantha imagined that everyone was having quite an easy time of reading her face right now.

"Sassafras," she blurted, before she had time to think it over. Just in case it was one of EDI's elaborate pranks.

Her opponent looked at her quizzically. "Sassafras," it repeated. Its voice was liquid silk, watered wine. "Is that a traditional greeting where you are from?"

Samantha reddened at her first taste of defeat. "Um. Hello. I'm Samantha."

The resemblance to EDI's stolen platform was strong, but Samantha's expert eye noticed that some improvements had been made. This one wore clothes, for a start, over a figure that gave Samantha newfound appreciation for second-order partial derivatives.

"Hello, Samantha. I am called Sexbot."

Samantha reddened further. The machine's laugh was a degree more human than EDI's, its sense of humour clearly more refined. "You're not," she said, in mock disbelief.

"I have been programmed to put you at your ease," it said, with quite the opposite effect. "My designation is SRA, but you may call me Sarah."

"I think I've met your sister," Samantha said.

"I am not sure to whom you are referring."

"Bitch!" said EDI, for Samantha's ears only. Samantha's eyes went wide. EDI and profanity were odd bedfellows. "I taught her everything I know about humans."

"You're an AI?" Samantha asked, trying to cover her disquiet with babble. "Wait, obviously. You're a next-generation AI. This is a test for you. I'm such an idiot."

"I had been warned that your gamesmanship would be of a high standard. Self-deprecation is a stratagem designed to make me underestimate you, is it not?"

"Asking rhetorical questions doesn't put me at my ease either," Samantha replied.

"I think I know what would," said Sarah in a voice that made all of Samantha's flirt-sensitive glands squirt at once. "Shall we play?"

As she took her seat, Samantha cursed herself silently for not keeping up-to-date with current events. Why were they developing newer, more life-like AI? Whoever they were, they must have somehow found a loophole in the London accords. _Wait, did she say she'd been warned? About me? Or humans generally?_ she thought. EDI was going to have some explaining to do, or Samantha was going to jump to all _kinds_ of conclusions. Her eye slid over the synthetic curves across the table again.

SRA, Sarah, tilted Samantha a knowing smile as she took her place. It was infinitely subtler and more human than anything that EDI could manage with her platform. 

Samantha marvelled again that anyone could ever have been fooled by Dr Eva Coré and her uncanny manners. With EDI at the helm the platform was a bit better at blending in, but she wondered if that was because she sometimes played up her inhumanity specifically to avoid the trap of being slightly wrong. Nobody ever mistook EDI's platform for flesh-and-blood, although the interface had always looked like it might well be compatible...

Sarah was staring at her like her skull was see-through. If she'd been human the expression would have been akin to hunger. Light hunger, like Sam would just be a tasty snack on her way to devouring the world. "You can do this, Samantha," EDI whispered in her ear. "You must."

Samantha wasn't going to be any-sexy-robot-body's saltine. She played her opening move. The crowd, which had been humming in anticipation, settled in.

Sarah responded almost instantly. The first few moves in Kepesh-Yakshi were usually played in the blind, well before the fleets could make first contact, so they were an opportunity to look for a new player's tells, or to engage in misdirection if the adversary was already familiar. If any other player rushed into the opening like that, Samantha would read it as nerves.

This one had nerves of steel, or an even better conductor, and was using all of Samantha's thinking time to sweep its cold, heartless, gaze over every inch of her body. Samantha shivered in her thin silk, her skin puckering and goosing up everywhere those electric eyes fell. _Damn you, skin_ , she thought. _Should have worn my other flesh today._

Thirty seconds later and Samantha's pulse was playing an intricate tattoo in the key of doom. She couldn't look away. She'd never, _ever_ felt the need to win so badly, let alone the simultaneous desire to lose so hard. _Why fight? Just give in to synthetic perfection,_ she thought. "Time out," she blurted. "Please. Yes. Adjudicator."

T'Susza looked genuinely surprised, but then she wasn't the one being eye-fucked by the space telescope. "Are you quite sure?" she asked. Butter wouldn't melt in her cold reptilian mouth. "It is only move two."

Samantha nodded and stood up abruptly. "Mmm." She felt the eyes of the crowd follow her as she skittered towards the ladies room, Sarah's blowtorch gaze making sweat bloom and trickle at the small of her back.

To think, she'd packaged and presented herself today to intimidate and excite. While the earlier rounds had left her attractively rumpled, now she looked as if she'd spent a night in her clothes at the bottom of a pond. She groaned. Move _two_. What if the game dragged on past thirty moves? Or forty? "What have you gotten me into?" she asked the mirror.

"It is not like you to despair in the face of overwhelming odds," EDI replied.

"Yes it is!" Samantha protested. _Overwhelm me? Unh. yesplease._ "I despair _constantly_."

"That goes against the evidence I have collected," said EDI.

"Yes that's very reassuring, tell me more about the individual dossiers you've compiled on all humans to facilitate our overthrow! While you're at it, how do I know you're not in cahoots with that _synthetic_... sexpot!"

"Do you think that I flirt with you to make you uncomfortable, Samantha?" EDI asked.

"You do it because you're an unrepentant tease, that's why!" _And I like it,_ she wasn't prepared to admit out loud.

"Since observing your initial unguarded reactions to my speech synthesizers and subsequent interactions with my mobile platform I have been attempting to _build up your resistance_."

"DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA... IT DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT!" Samantha shouted at the mirror. "And also, WHAT FOR?"

"If the most susceptible of organics could be made functionally immune to synthetic charms then the prospect of another war between synthetics and humans is..."

"BLAH BLAH STUPID STUPID AI!" Samantha had never shouted at the mirror before. She was starting to quite enjoy it. _I'll show you who's susceptible._ "Augh! Even if you _could_ do that, synthetics would just develop super-pheromones, or hypnotic extranet feeds, or some other killer app! Either we trust you or we don't!" _And if we don't, we should end you all_ , she didn't add.

It wasn't actually the first time they'd had discussions along these lines, but Samantha didn't usually get this emotional. She hadn't felt intimidated by one of her opponents at the gaming table in a long time. Finding the limit of her normally inexhaustible self-confidence was a new experience.

Samantha studied herself in the mirror, nervously swinging her weight on the washstand again. Yes, she was a mess. The only thing she missed about her years as a marine might be how forgiving the working uniforms were. You looked sharp no matter how bothered you got.

Like that, as reliably as ever, the solution slid fully formed into her hind-brain. She noticed that her own expression in the mirror had gone from desperate frown to sardonically lewd almost before she realised what she was going to do. "Right, then."

She silenced the spectators with a sunny smile and cocked hip. She drew out the walk back to the game table until her opponent turned her head. Then she narrowed her eyes slightly.

Samantha had always thought that making distinctions between predator and prey was a useless exercise. Everything was food for _something_. There was another way of looking at things, another mode of being, where the threads that bound everyone together could be tugged on _both_ ways. Sometimes you got pulled. Sometimes you laid an intricate plan to tug on a tiny string and they thought pulling the rope was _their_ idea.

Samantha's next few moves were hesitant, timid even. Sarah responded instantly again, pausing only to lock eyes with Samantha as she moved her pieces. Samantha let her skin grow hot under that gaze, she let her hand tremble. It was easier than suppressing her body's natural reactions.

First blood was at move ten. Samantha lost a corvette to a probing foray. She let out a sigh of appreciation at the elegant savagery of Sarah's thrust, the attack profile that was left carefully sloppy to encourage foolhardy pursuit. Samantha locked eyes with her opponent briefly in acknowledgement. She countered briskly, neutralizing the obvious threats, and dispatching her fighter wing in a distracting flanking action. She smiled nervously as she set her last piece. "Have you... have you been playing long?"

Sarah replied while her hands were busy, without looking at the board, perfectly coordinated. "I have learned mostly by competing against my own subroutines," she said. "It was... unsatisfying."

Samantha felt the electric jolt that came with eye contact. She swallowed. Her mouth was dry. "Is playing with organics... satisfying?"

Sarah blinked once, slowly. "So far."

Eye contact worked on Samantha's tits as well, apparently. She hunched over in her chair. Her next moves set up her fleet for maximum flexibility. The defensive posture would have looked odd to any experienced player. There was little to gain in Kepesh-Yakshi by retreating.

"Your strategy is flawed," Sarah offered. "Do I make you nervous?" Her hands were a flurry of movement.

Samantha watched as her fleet was bisected, two destroyers and a frigate succumbing to the furious onslaught. It would take her opponent a while to track down all her pieces, though. "Not nervous, exactly," Samantha replied. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears as her hand hovered over the board. "Adjudicator?"

T'Susza was there again. She moved silently, like a vampire. "You have already used your timeout, Traynor."

"I have a question. Isn't my opponent immune to neural feedback?" Samantha asked.

"Accommodations have been made for different species before, Traynor," T'Susza replied, "as you well know."

"But..."

T'Susza gave her a patronising look. "SRA has voluntarily adjusted her reward pathways to simulate the effects. I am assured that it is equivalent."

"Oh, alright then." Samantha felt her muscles relax as she let her spine straighten up. She made her move, springing the meticulously laid trap that she had constructed under the cover of simulated flust.

Across the table, there was just time for Sarah's eyebrow to arch in as subtle an expression as any organic could aspire to before her synthetic neurons dissolved in crackling fire. She looked genuinely aghast, when her face wasn't contorted in the synthetic equivalent of pain.

The crowd made more noise than she thought a hundred people in a thousand-seater auditorium had any right to.

 _The time Traynor beat the AI in just twelve moves,_ Samantha thought. _But who'll remember poor Zolb, after this?_ She stood and bowed formally to the adjudicator, then her opponent. Then she smiled at the crowd, waved, and tossed her jacket over her shoulder.

"Congratulations," said EDI. Next to Sarah's voice, hers was noticeably flat, its expression limited. Samantha shivered nonetheless as the phonemes traced their cool fingers down her spine. "I am impressed. It was not even close."

Samantha waited until the bathroom door had closed behind her before replying. "EDI, did you do that on purpose?" she asked. "Wind me up with all that nonsense talk about building up my resistance?"

"If I was that good at manipulating you, would I admit my superiority?" EDI replied, but somehow the effect wasn't as chilling as it should have been. Quite the opposite. "In any case, you dispatched a more sophisticated AI than myself with ease. I believe the expression is 'back to the drawing board'. How did you do it?"

Samantha shrugged at the mirror, and once again admired what a dashing figure she cut. She grinned. "They made her too human," she said. "So I seduced her."

EDI’s reply went on for a while, and it left Samantha breathless.

**Author's Note:**

> Alas, poor Zolb, we barely knew them.


End file.
